Red Sky Over Cairo

A lifetime of waiting, stacks of National Geographic half as tall as me, piled on every step. A girl with nothing to do but dream. The yellow-black jackets buzzed, I flowered as I turned the pages. The relics of Tutankhamun fascinated: gold, turquoise, lapis and the slaves in mud-brick houses they live in still. I longed to be the Pharaoh’s daughter; I kohled my eyes. Egypt called to me. Pyramids, deserts baking, heat mirages, and oases of palms with still blue water. The twenty-first century’s reality is far different. Cairo teems with discontent, Mubarak’s campaign posters hung from each lamppost. Two weeks before the Arab Spring, I was there. The only safety found behind the gun-guarded, razor-wired gates of the upper class, and even then— A country espousing religious freedom was killing Coptic Christians in the streets, and bombing churches. Cairo’s one poster child synagogue stood empty, except for tourists—dark, decorative, haunting, full of tales of Christ’s sojourn in Egypt? The pyramids rose hen-pecked by pollution through a surreal orange sky. Masked women walk the male dominated streets. Women live in fear in or out of the hijab. The majesty of yesteryear, the pyramid of Giza squats like a discard in the ashtray of desert. Vendors and tourist litter the site. Baksheesh is the only God in Egypt, baksheesh and the horded water of the Nile. First Published in here & there magazine in the UK